By: Mary Mostert, Analyst (bannerofliberty.com)
January 14, 2003
Alfred Pugh, one of the approximately 1000 surviving World War I veterans in America died last week. He was the last known and oldest combat-wounded U.S. veteran of World War I. He was 108, just 10 days short of his 109th birthday.
Pugh, who often told visitors the key to a long life is "keep breathing," joined the Army in 1917 and fought in France during World War I with the 77th Infantry Division. In 1918, he was wounded in a German gas attack when his battalion was caught without gas masks during the Meuse-Argonne battle, the last major battle of World War I.
Taking a look at this almost totally forgotten war might be helpful for Americans like presidential hopeful Howard Dean, who see no value to America in the Bush Administration liberating 26 million Afghans from the clutches of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban or liberating 23 million Iraqis from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein to compare today’s war with past wars.
On the 20-mile Meuse-Argonne front where the main American attack was to be made, Pershing disposed three corps side by side, each with three divisions in line and one in corps reserve. On the left were the I Corps, which included the 35th, 28th, and 77th Divisions with the 92d in reserve, which would advance parallel to the French Fourth Army on its left. The commander of the American troops, General John J. (Black Jack) Pershing in his final report on the battle wrote, “Between September 26 and November 11, 22 American and 4 French divisions, on the front extending from southeast of Verdun to the Argonne Forest, had engaged and decisively beaten 47 different German divisions, representing 25 percent of the enemy's entire divisional strength on the western front. The First Army suffered a loss of about 117,000 in killed and wounded. It captured 26,000 prisoners, 847 cannon, 3,000 machineguns, and large quantities of material."
In 1918 France, which was then overrun by the Germans, had a population of 32 million, comparable to California’s population today. In late June, 1917, when General Pershing and his troops marched through Paris to the tomb of Marquis de Lafayette, the French officer who fought beside George Washington and helped secure the aid of the French Navy to defeat the British. It was reported worldwide that General Pershing saluted the tomb and stated, “Lafayette, we are here!" Americans had come to return a favor.
A Democrat President, Woodrow Wilson, mustered 4,734,991 American soldiers to save the French nation. In fact, more than 1,200,000 Americans took part in the 47-day campaign of the Meuse-Argonne battle. In World War I, 116,516 Americans were killed and 204,000 were wounded. A total of 1,462 men were killed and 72,807 were, like Alfred Pugh, wounded in German chemical warfare attacks alone.
In other words, the Germans killed approximately three times the number of soldiers in World War I from chemical attacks than have been killed in freeing close to 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq from terrorist regimes in the past couple of years by the Bush Administration.
When I read of the death of Alfred Pugh, at age 108, nearly 109, I thought of something my son Dr. Guy Grooms had told me more than 10 years ago, after returning home from 7 months in the Saudi Desert in 1990-91 dodging SCUD missiles being shot at him by Saddam Hussein and experiencing dozens of alarms of chemicals in the air. As the Battalion Surgeon for the Marine force that recaptured Kuwait City he told me that the main reason why chemical weapons had not been used against them by the Iraqis because they would not have been effective, especially when the desert winds were blowing. He also pointed out that all those World War I soldiers who had been gassed, many of whom were on disability, had the save average life expectancy of soldiers who had not been gassed. As a doctor, his conclusion was that if the gas didn’t immediately kill, it appeared to have no lasting impact.
I would think that Alfred Pugh’s experience of being completely knocked out and in the hospital for a week following the gas attack, but then living to be 108 might tend to verify the statement that the fears of chemical weapons often is more deadly than the chemical itself.
Those thoughts were then interrupted by an e-mail from a reader who keeps trying to convince me that, really, the sky is falling and it is George W. Bush who is causing it to fall. An anti-Bush Australian named John Pilger, writing to convince us that really and truly what’s going on in Iraq is what he dubs “coalition crime in Iraq.” He claimed, “Of 10,000 Americans evacuated sick from Iraq, many have ‘mystery illnesses’ not unlike those suffered by veterans of the first Gulf war…for example, the effect of uranium weapons used by American and British forces is suppressed. Iraqi and foreign doctors report that radiation illnesses are common throughout Iraq, and troops have been warned not to approach contaminated sites.”
If there’s radiation contamination in Iraq, it did not come from “depleted uranium.” “Depleted uranium” has about half the “radiation” that rocks containing uranium in Utah have, where I happen to live. In fact, according to the World Health Organization, Depleted Uranium, because of its density, which is twice that of lead, is used as radiation shields in medical radiation therapy machines and containers for the transport of radioactive materials. Militarily, it is used for defensive armor plate, for instance on our tanks, and for armor penetrating ordnance.
Depleted Uranium would not be used for radiation shields if it gave off radiation.
There’s a lesson in this story. Take with a grain of salt the media hype that accompanies political attacks during this election year. Get the facts – and pay less attention to the inaccurate and/or overblown “the sky is falling” rhetoric you will hear.
Back in the 1930s, when my best friend’s father was expected to die before she finished school because he had been gassed in World War I, no one would have believed that in 2004 a World War I gassed vet would die at the age of 108. Least of all, me.
To comment: Mary@bannerofliberty.com